Come with me now on a tour of my laboratory...

I made this safety sign. Nobody's yet noticed (in 2 years) that it doesn't *quite* meet the specifications of safety signs! Goes to show how often people actually read these things.

Safety is very important in the laser lab - we have a fancy interlock system that shuts the lasers off in case an unauthorised user enters the room. (In other words, whenever my boss decides to give an impromptu tour and screws up my experiment!)

Security first! It doesn't take a master criminal to work out our code...

The laser beam is hitting a piece of card coated in a fluorescent paint - the laser makes the paint emit light at visible wavelengths, so you can see where the laser's going OH DEAR GOD IT'S GOING INTO MY EYE oh no wait, false alarm...

Expensive laser optics! Rule of thumb: these various lenses and mirrors and stands and mounts cost roughly 100x what you might think a reasonable price is. (For instance, one of the lenses we use in the microscope costs about £2,000).

This is a fancy piece of kit, it's a lock-in amplifier. We use it to pick out low-intensity electronic signal that is being modulated at at a high frequency.

Gratuitous 'mad scientist' selfie - no apologies given for this. Be honest, if you were left alone in here at night too, this is at LEAST what you'd get up to.

This is tonight's sample - a wiggly wormy. It lives in sludge at the seaside normally - I will be seeing whether it's ingested any small particles of plastic pollution.

This is another sample I've worked with - it's SYNTHETIC HUMAN SKIN. Pretty weird. It's all wibbly and goopy and packed full with living human skin cells embedded in a synthetic matrix. Gonna use it to see how drugs penetrate into the skin!